Business Intelligence Investigation And Legal And Illegal Boundaries Of Commercial Espionage

What is commercial espionage? To understand that this concept must understand another concept - business intelligence, collect, organize, analyze, and research various business information through conventional and legal means, the relevant data is business intelligence, and this process is called business intelligence investigation. The premise of business intelligence is the collection method and approach, which must fully comply with legal requirements and ethics. "Commercial espionage" involving illegal crimes refers to violations of commercial secret rights. Trade secrets refer to technical information and business information that is not known to the public, can bring economic benefits to the rights holder, are practical, and are subject to confidentiality measures by the right holder.

In most cases, using all available means to get as much information as possible is actually something that every company must do every day. Therefore, the "commercial espionage" behavior can only constitute the two elements of "unfairness of means" and "speciality of secrets", in order to constitute a crime of crime, in addition to the "commercial espionage" behavior can only be legal And in our common commercial espionage methods, it has been publicly disclosed as follows:

Step/method

1. Peek at email

Using hacker technology to enter the other database through the network to steal confidential information is a common practice used by commercial espionage. In 2009, AMX, the world's largest manufacturer of electrical control systems, broke the scandal. David Goldenberg, a former vice president of the New York area, illegally hacked into the email system of the Sapphire Marketing Company of New Jersey. Sapphire provides marketing consulting services to AMX's main competitor, Crestron, which Gordon admitted in court to illegally acquire Crestron's marketing strategy.

2. Illegal download of files

In March 2007, US software giant Oracle filed a lawsuit in the San Francisco District Court, claiming that its competitor, SAP, used its subsidiary's business relationship with Oracle to illegally break into the password-protected part of its website and downloaded nearly a thousand sensitive ones. data. The two sides finally reached a settlement, and SAP paid a huge amount of compensation.

3. Implanted Trojan horse program

In 2004, an Israeli writer found that his unpublished manuscript was bizarrely published on the Internet. Later, with the assistance of the relevant departments, he discovered the original reason. The laptops used for writing were actually planted with Trojan horse programs. The software can secretly send data such as stolen text and images to multiple network storage servers.

The Israeli police then found a hacker who designed the Trojan horse, but the investigators who thought the case ended up were surprised to find that the hacker also provided the software to three famous private detective firms in the country. And private detectives, with the help of high technology, provide their corporate customers with the intelligence of stolen competitors. The most serious commercial espionage case in Israel’s history has led to the arrest of dozens of private detectives and corporate executives, who have lost hundreds of millions of dollars.

4. Treasure hunt in the trash

Sometimes, commercial spies are also eyeing competitors' bins, hoping to find valuable information from discarded waste, which in many cases does work.

In 2000, Larry Ellison, CEO of the famous software giant Oracle, admitted to the public that he had ordered a year-long "espionage" against Microsoft. It turned out that Oracle sent private detectives to the US Competitive Technology Association, the Independent Institute and the National Taxpayers Alliance to search for information in the trash cans, wondering whether these institutions had accepted bribes from rival Microsoft, which was facing monopoly charges at the time. Ellison said that such behavior is fulfilling the responsibility of citizens. "We are definitely doing collecting work, and I will never feel sorry for such behavior."

The global daily chemical giant P&G also had the experience of searching for treasures in the opponent's trash can. In 2001, P&G hired private detectives to dress up as market analysts and cleaners into its largest competitor, Unilever's office building in Chicago, to collect garbage from the new product development office, and really found a lot about it. Information on the new shampoo.

5. Buy the other employee

As the saying goes, the fortress is the easiest to break from inside. This sentence is also very suitable for today's commercial spy battlefield so that providing information to the other employees is a favorite method for many companies.

In the F1 "Spy Door" scandal that shocked international sports in 2007, the Ferrari team accused rival McLaren of buying the Ferrari former technical director Nigel Stephen to get the latest information. It is reported that Stephen provided 780 pages of top-secret information to Mike Cleveland, the chief designer of McLaren, including the internal structure of the Ferrari, operational design, commissioning data, tactical secrets and future developments. The incident became the biggest spy case in F1's history. The McLaren team was finally canceled by the FIA and fined $100 million.

In 1943, P&G bought a few new products, "Swan" brand soap, from employees of Unilever (also known as Lihua Brothers). After testing and analysis, P&G improved its own “pigeon” brand soap. After discovering the truth, Unilever took P&G to court for theft of patents, but the two parties finally lost money with out-of-court settlement and P&G.

Harold Woden, an engineer who has served the film giant Kodak for 28 years, bought his own former colleague. He started his own consulting firm after leaving Kodak, but the actual business was to provide Kodak's competitors with information about film materials through bribery of former colleagues and earned a profit from it.

6. Digging the corner

Buying the other company's corporate employees generally sneak a secret operation to avoid being noticed, but sometimes it will be placed on the countertop, which is to dig the corner.

Jose Lopez, a former executive at GM, is a man of the American automotive industry and has reduced production costs through a series of innovations during his tenure. Pécs, CEO of Volkswagen, took a look at Lopez's ability and successfully convinced him to change jobs. When Lopez left GM, he took away 12 boxes of "private documents", which included the top secrets of the GM's new car plan, supply price and production line. After GM was informed, Volkswagen and Lopez were brought to court and eventually received $100 million in compensation.

7. From the Oolong

Sometimes, some careless companies don't even need competitors to steal and take the initiative to send the information out. The most common is the accidental loss of data and samples. In addition, poor communication with partners is also an important cause of information leakage. A software company in the United States and a university research institute jointly developed new software. Before the official launch of the market, the research institute published some research results on the website, and the competitors took the lead.